Poetry Winter 2021 fiction all issues
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Cover
Andrej Lišakov
Laura Apol
I Take a Realtor through the House
& other poems
Rebekah Wolman
How I Want my Body Taken
& other poems
Devon Bohm
The Word
& other poems
Gillian Freebody
The Right Kind of Woman
& other poems
Anne Marie Wells
Gravestone Flowers
& other poems
Laura Turnbull
Restoration
& other poems
Andre F. Peltier
A Fistful of Ennui
& other poems
Peter Kent
Reflections on the Late Nuclear Attack on Boston
& other poems
Carol Barrett
Canal Poem #8: Hides
& other poems
Alix Lowenthal
Abortion Clinic Waiting Room
& other poems
Latrise P. Johnson
From My Women
& other poems
Brenna Robinson
repurposed
& other poems
may panaguiton
MOON KILLER
& other poems
Elizabeth Farwell
The Life That Scattered
& other poems
Bill Cushing
Two Stairways
& other poems
Richard Baldo
A Note to Prepare You
& other poems
Blake Foster
Aubade from the Coast
& other poems
Bernard Horn
Glamour
& other poems
Harald Edwin Pfeffer
Still stiff with morning cold
& other poems
Nia Feren
Neon Orange Tree Trunks
& other poems
Everett Roberts
A Mourning Performance
& other poems
Alaina Goodrich
The Way I Wander
& other poems
Olivia Dorsey Peacock
the iron maiden and other adornments
& other poems
Gillian Freebody
No Longer Useful
In the predawn push of rush hour traffic,
the open-eyed doe on the highway shoulder
meets my eye as if still taut and breathing,
her soul already abandoning
the heavy cage of her body
as she rests like a shattered statue
on the side of the road,
and I, late to work, swarm among
the masses trapped on this thoroughfare
of horns and flashing lights,
streams of people surging towards
what exactly—
fast and tumbling, restless and rolling
as a river over rocks.
Her forest is lost somewhere far beyond
the steaming asphalt,
flaming stoplights,
screeching sirens,
peeling tires,
belching exhaust
when her sudden frantic stride
toward safety
meets with metal
and a crushing thud—
spine on hood and legs
briefly a ballerina’s
against a moonless sky
before spiraling off
to the side, breath breaking
like a dam emptying into its source
as I bridge the exit ramp curve
to witness the moment after.
Her black disks still catch light,
throw it to me before the sun spills
its way over this pulsing street,
crawling across her heaving
breast, holding the slightest sliver
of recognition before flattening black
and unseeing, utterly abandoned,
so if I move her to the grass,
she will still be warm, perhaps
a second heart beating
inside, and I think of the phone,
the police, the raging rush of emergency
to cut her open in the last release of blood
through veins quickening with cold before it is too late—
why her eyes flickered to me, begging me
to stop, to weigh what she asks,
my own womb empty but for futile bleeding.
But on this side of our human hell
where every thrust of traffic poisons us
in swells of smoke, we gasp like animals
called to our deaths much too early,
can I pull over? Save what remains
so I can tell myself I did everything
I could before it all rots, decays,
must be carted away by thick-gloved men
with unshaven beards wordlessly arriving
too late in a rusty pick-up piled with blood-stained
shovels saved solely for this purpose -
this disposing of what was once achingly beautiful
lost now somewhere under an overpass
on a cold curve of highway where things
no longer useful linger until finally slipping away
as if never there at all?
I am late and do not stop.
The Right Kind of Woman
Here is the hard truth of it:
the bitch who lives in my skin
has carved her way into my heart
claws sharpened to pristine points
that glint and sparkle when dragged
across the frozen terrain of hesitant
beating muscle
Yesterday when your hand brushed mine
on the sun-dappled gravel trail
she bucked and slammed into my rib cage
like a wild animal trapped in an attic
throwing itself against walls and windows
until blood puddled deep enough to leak
three floors down to the dirt
I have always been a bird shit marble bust
my body: a betrayal of near-boyhood,
breastbone curved outward like the bend
of an archery bow so any alluring swells
fell into the cavern of my chest, eliciting
apologies and red-faced shame.
Sharp-fanged braces, dried-out perms,
stub-toed feet that next to yours look
like fish fins. I’m sorry, so sorry
I learned that loving men is a live minefield
a white-knuckled life and death dance
I enter into with teeth bared like a rabid tiger rushing headlong
into a battle of torn flesh and shattered bone.
Love me anyway, I’d beg as I stripped naked for shock
the skinny-dip not to be denied, all the flat planes
and deadly edges hidden in darkness and the shadows of water
And as I’d kneel against the night sky, it’d drink itself down
to cloak me, my head heavy as a wrecking ball
how can I touch your hand in the innocent curve of
can-we-start-again when I always thought
I’d be the right kind of woman: the loving, loyal wife
not this wicked hag, this blackened pearl, this broken-winged
crow beating itself to death on the side of the road
the same thin-hipped girl who grew faint from starvation
veins pumped with revulsion, rejection, a self sabotaged by hate
but as you turn to face me now, eyes filled with forgiveness,
fingers gently placed in my bleeding palms,
instead of wondering WHY? in the screaming rush
of vulnerability laid bare, I whisper how?
as you apply the tourniquet and lay me down
Layout from the High Dive
When my father launched a layout
from the high dive, the lake drew up its heels—
sandcastle constructions, splashing contests,
lifeguard training runs, can’t-put-down beach reads,
utterly forgotten.
Hands palm up in supplication,
in communion,
in the hard steel confidence
of man at his most powerful,
he’d pause before the pump upward,
his toes on the board,
the crouch before take-off,
and I’d suck in my breath,
hold it like a secret when his thighs,
chiseled as a marble god,
extended up so his raised hands reached
to catch clouds playing chase, hopeless
in the face of his IT, while the full extension
of his body against the sky’s blue canvas
made its own shadow on the afternoon,
a spread-eagled savior on the cross
as his perfectly timed arc brought his feet
around toward the water and he sank
without a splash, water swallowing him
as time resumed its ceaseless surge forward
and I watched for his break through the surface.
I’d exhale when his otter body emerged,
ebony hair soaked and sparkling in the sun,
light playing off his shoulders and spine
as he’d stroke freestyle to the ladder.
And as he climbed onto shore,
the beach found its voice again,
laughter and splashing, shouting for
ice cream and ever-lasting summer.
But people peeked beneath their
squinting lids, shaded their eyes
with sun-dappled fingers to glance quickly
at the man who caught the clouds
in their race with time, who,
in his miraculous found-freedom,
etched himself on the sky
for the briefest of moments
before sinking down.
Settling, The Hudson River Valley
Before Wiltwyk and that great walled stockade that defined our borders,
we worshipped the confluence of creek to river, flooding the banks
with fertile ferns and foliage, ripening crop beds, emboldening
the oxygen in shared veins, one native, one settler,
our mothers’ skirts pulled up and knotted at the thigh.
One white, one brown, Dutch and Esopus,
making twig dolls in the grass, chins dribbling the juice
of Macintosh, Empire, Granny, and laughing,
open-mouthed, teeth sparkling like ivory stars
in night sky mouths that know no difference,
no color, no trade but sweet sap sticking to
grimy earth-dusted fingers, envious crows
circling overhead like macabre halos, harbingers
of thunderheads in the West, the mad scramble
for cover, for soil, for the throne at the head of the table.
The pitch-pine oaks and rush of river over stone
smoothed the storm of resentment for days,
so that fires burned in rock rings and muzzles
hung cold on breezy barn doors.
I know we were not afraid, not yet, in that valley
of Rondout’s swell into the Hudson.
The Gray’s Sedge and Wild Rye pushed
through the cracks of our floorboards
and Silver Maples canopied our games of tag
and skipping stones, the stretch of afternoon
that knew only women meeting
in the stream’s apex, trading secrets, stripping pelts.
Look at us there in the 17th century, our feet
filthy with the dust of another’s land, appeasing
our stabs of guilt with fine white linen, the copper glint
of tea kettle, mortar and pestle already ground down
to flawless bone.
But what of trade and its mutual bounty that wanes
like sunlight over a stone wall? The river’s heaving heart
pulled up as the men took sides, stood on opposite banks,
demanded concession of the water, of each other.
And when the current would not bend, massive stones
were hauled up the hill we once tumbled down like rabbits,
drilled so deeply into the dirt, my hand on the cool husk
of shale catches the same light it did then, skin so pale
it is nearly transparent.
See how the bones meet there at the wrist, each finger
a branch reaching from the same trunk, the same rush
of water, the same river bed where lives pause and swirl,
however briefly, without seams, without colors, without skin,
greed hushed as the water surges forward,
washes over us, baptizes us anew
until.
Gillian Freebody
is a veteran writing teacher who dedicated the past twenty years to encouraging student writing, both academic and creative. When the pandemic hit, Gillian found herself returning to her own writing as a way to cope with terror and isolation. Silver linings do exist. Gillian tries to find them everywhere every day.